Along its western border, China's influence is only beginning to grow.

Chinese President Hu Jintao arrives for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg June 14, 2009 (Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)

In the gravelly, uncertain road coursing through Kyrgyzstan's picturesque Alay Valley, it does not take long to stumble across the Chinese road workers'
camp. Though just a dusty collection of prefab dormitories, the camps nevertheless proudly display the company's name, logo and various slogans in large
red Chinese characters. A Kyrgyz security guard is fast asleep on his cot, and the camp is deserted except for a young engineer from Sichuan. He explains
that they work six months out of the year, when snow doesn't block the passes. Next year, the road will be finished. He says his friends that work on
Chinese-built roads in Africa get a better deal.

Further down the road, amid bulldozers and trucks full of dirt, are the road workers. They're slowly reshaping the mountains, molding them into smooth
inclines and regulation grades. Then there are the trucks; hundreds of them, crowding at the Chinese/Kyrgyz border, all engaged in the increasingly active
trade between the two countries. One of the truckers, a member of China's Muslim Uighur minority, is eager to chat. The roof of the world is his workplace.
It takes three days to drive a 30 ton load from Kashgar, in China's Xinjiang province, through Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan. He and his
colleagues bring 100 such loads across every week.

Related Story

In many ways, China has a stranglehold on Kyrgyzstan's economy, so much so that, in the words of a former Kyrgyz cabinet member, the country's economy
would collapse without its giant neighbor to the east. What little wealth that is generated in Kyrgyzstan is due to its role as a re-export center for
Chinese goods headed for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, its richer neighbors, and Russia.

Kyrgyzstan is not a resource-rich country by most measures, but Chinese mining companies are active throughout its expansive countryside, exploring and
extracting, sometimes in disregard of environmental consequences. These mining operations have occasionally been subject to raids from locals on horseback,
but these attacks do not deter the Chinese. Kyrgyzstan does have some oil, but until now, it has not had the capacity to refine it into fuel. In the past,
Kyrgyz drivers were dependent on their old colonizer, Russia, to refine the oil and ship it back to them for consumption. Not any more. A Chinese company
is building a small refinery in Kyrgyzstan, using small-scale projects such as these to increase its influence in the country.

China's behavior in Kyrgyzstan is symptomatic of its wider approach to Central Asia, a remote region that has become central to Beijing's global diplomatic
and economic profile. Driven by the Chinese economy's voracious appetite for natural resources, business opportunities along ancient trade routes, and a
paramount desire to bring stability through development to a region bordering on China's restive Xinjiang province, these varied Chinese actors are rapidly
reshaping a region that was both Russia's back yard and the United States' staging ground for operations in Afghanistan.

Consider one of China's largest firms, energy giant CNPC. Staring in 2007, CNPC built a pipeline connecting China's eastern coast with the immense natural
gas fields of Turkmenistan in eighteen months -- a global record -- and is in the process of lengthening it to reach the resource-rich Caspian Sea.

China's behavior in Kyrgyzstan is symptomatic of its wider approach to Central Asia, a remote region that has become central to Beijing's global diplomatic
and economic profile

A series of purchases through a Chinese-Kazakhstani joint venture is set to bring China control of 40 percent of Kazakhstan's
gargantuan oil wealth. CNPC plans to expand its natural gas network to all six Central Asian states (including Afghanistan) in the next five years, not
only sending gas to Chinese consumers, but also distributing it in the region in order to gain political favor.

Meanwhile, China has taken the concept of a "new silk road" -- official if unrealized U.S. policy -- and turned it into reality. The China Road and Bridge
Company (CRBC), as well as other contractors, have taken on the region's highway, railroad and electricity transmission challenges, paving over some of the
world's most forbidding terrain while creating a new 'Synthetic Road' for Chinese goods to reach Europe, the Middle East and Chinese-built ports in Pakistan and
Iran. The new road from Irkeshtam to Osh, containing the lone Sichuan engineer at his camp, is just one of many routes.

But, with such wide-ranging investments, is China concerned about security in a region abutting South Asia and the Middle East?

Beijing has long been reluctant to take on responsibilities for security outside of its borders, yet it remains paranoid about the potential spillover of Islamist
extremism or ethnic conflict into Xinjiang. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- a China-led regional grouping encompassing
four Central Asian states and Russia -- serves partly as a coordinator for monitoring Uighurs and other perceived threats. This bloc, which has been called the
NATO of the East, is arguably little more than a re-branding of bilateral Chinese initiatives as multilateral legitimacy. In 2012, the SCO served as cover for the
offer of $10 billion in Chinese soft loans to members Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. As Western forces prepare leave Afghanistan and the
rest of Central Asia by the end of 2014, China may find that it has to upgrade the SCO and other security arrangements to fill the regional security vacuum.

China has never explicitly stated that it seeks hegemony -- economic or otherwise -- over Central Asia. Yet China has become the most consequential actor in
the region due to the unmistakable confluence of several actors: state owned enterprises looking for the next big project, shuttle traders seeking new markets, Confucius
Institute teachers and overseas Chinese community organizers. These are the rather disorganized shock troops of China's would-be empire in Central Asia.

Remote as the Central Asian region may be, China's geopolitical future lies here. Its vast western land borders provide an outlet to the world's markets
that the encircled South China Sea does not. In going west, the droves of Chinese opportunity seekers are repeating history along the old Silk Road.
However, China's economic growth is now farther reaching and its global profile greater than even at the height of its imperial history. In
Central Asia, China is redrawing the great power map and the consequences will be felt from Moscow, to Brussels to New Delhi and Washington. It is a
Manifest Destiny that has only just begun.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.